William "Billy" Hutchinson had seen the respectable family theatres of San Francisco, packed with eager crowds paying good money for clean entertainment. He and his wife Lottie imagined something similar for Tombstone. They opened the Bird Cage with a Ladies Night, inviting the respectable women of the mining town to attend for free. But Tombstone's economics had other plans. The rough mining crowd that kept silver flowing from the earth cared little for family shows. The Hutchinsons soon canceled Ladies Night and pivoted to baser entertainment that appealed to men who spent their days underground and their nights seeking escape.

Cornish wrestling emerged as one of the Bird Cage's prime attractions, with results regularly published back in the United Kingdom where the sport originated. Stage magic shows drew rowdy crowds, though performers quickly learned that Tombstone audiences played by different rules than San Francisco ones. The theatre's suspended box seats, which gave the building its name, offered private viewing for those who could afford it. Below, the basement held a poker room where fortunes changed hands. The original 1881 rosewood piano still sits before the stage, and the faro table with its "honest box" remains, artifacts of an era when gambling and entertainment merged seamlessly.

When Hutchinson sold the Bird Cage to Hugh McCrum and John Stroufe, they brought in Joe Bignon to manage it. Bignon knew the variety theatre business, having managed the Theatre Comique in San Francisco and performed as a blackface minstrel and clog dancer. He refurbished the building and renamed it the Elite Theatre, hiring new acts to draw the mining crowd. His wife earned the nickname "Big Minnie" for good reason. She wore pink tights on stage where she sang, danced, and played piano. A portrait of Fatima, a belly dancer who performed at the Bird Cage, decorated the bar from 1882 onward.

Tombstone's silver mines fought a constant battle against groundwater seeping into the shafts. The large Cornish engines brought in by mine owners kept the pumps running, the water at bay, the silver flowing. On May 26, 1886, the Grand Central Mine's hoist and pumping plant burned. The fire marked the beginning of the end. Without the pumps, water reclaimed the mines. By 1892, the Bird Cage closed its doors. The building sat essentially abandoned for decades until it was leased as a coffee shop in 1934. Today it operates as a museum, its bullet holes still visible in the walls, one of Arizona's most atmospheric remnants of the Wild West.

The 1993 film Tombstone brought the Bird Cage Theatre back to popular consciousness, featuring it in scenes depicting the lives of Wyatt Earp, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and the legendary Doc Holliday. The building earned a place on lists of reportedly haunted locations in Arizona, perhaps unsurprisingly given its violent history. Visitors today can descend to the basement poker room, peer into the suspended box seats called "cribs" where working girls plied their trade, and stand on the same stage where that magician nearly met his end. The dumbwaiter that carried drinks from the bar still operates, a mechanical ghost from an era when Tombstone earned its reputation as "the town too tough to die."